Does metadata matter?

July 2008

Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundationandy.powell@eduserv.org.uk

www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation

July 2008Does metadata matter? 2

should we be interested in metadata and, if so, why?

I’m going to try to deliver 130 slides in 30 minutes

then you can ask questions

(yes… I really did say “130 slides”)

non-technical

metadata jargon

first, some history…

metadata is…

machine-readable

descriptive

for the purposes of…

resource discovery

resource management

delivery / access control

use / re-use

long term preservation

MARC - Machine-Readable Catalogue

still the predominant

metadata standard

(in thelibrary world)

a distributed search standard called…

Z39.50

so that multiple library catalogues can be searched from one place

AACR2 currently being replaced by…

(more generic – i.e. not just books!)

Z39.50 supplemented by SRW and SRU

(Web-friendly variants)

none of which needs bother you…

other than to note that…

metadata tends to get more complicated the longer you think about it

a few 10s of 1000s of pages

but recognised that finding stuff was going to start getting difficult

people (mainly librarians) began trying to catalogue it by hand

http://www.intute.ac.uk/http://www.intute.ac.uk/

meanwhile…

AltaVista

(first major Web search engine – circa 1995)

people began to realise that the metadata they embedded into Web pages might be important

hang on…

did I just say “metadata embedded into Web pages”?

<html><head><title>A web page</title><meta name=“keywords” content=“some, key, words” /><meta name=“description” content=“a summary” /></head><body>…

birth of the SEO industry

then came Google

and the rest, as they say, is history

Google takes note of links between pages

Google PageRank

but places less emphasis on embedded metadata

metaspam

metacrap

<title>put your title here</title>

despite that, work continued on embedded metadata

most notably in the form of…

Dublin Core

(circa 1995)

initially 15 metadata elements

a.k.a properties

a.k.a. attribute/value pairs

contributorcoveragecreator

datedescription

formatidentifierlanguagepublisherrelationrightssourcesubject

titletype

embedded into Web pages

or encoded using XML

intention was to improve indexing by search engines

but people forgot about…

“metaspam” and “metacrap”

the search engines didn’t!

and so, by and large,

search engines still ignore embedded metadata

despite that, there has been fairly widespread adoption in policy terms

particularly in e-Government(e.g. UK eGMS)

but also in other areas – education, health, environmental agencies, libraries, cultural

heritage sector, …

growth of rules around metadata content(i.e. cataloguing rules)

(everyone’s rules are different)

and growth in use of additional elements for particular communities

(and everyone’s additions are different)

such usage documented in the form of “application profiles”

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative

coordinating “standards” body

(note again: growing complexity over time)

meanwhile…

the W3C developed the Resource Description Framework (RDF)

(circa 1999)

the standard for the “Semantic Web”

Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for a machine-readable Web of data

allowing software to navigate and reason about Web content automatically

a Web of “Linked Data”

RDF, RDFS, OWL, FOAF, …

(but also Microformats, RSS, …)

meanwhile…

elearning community was busy developing its own standards

IEEE LOM(Learning Object Metadata)

same as DC

…but different!

(different elements, different syntax)

a brief aside

identifiers are important

URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) is the identifier system of the Web

but some issues…

e.g. around persistence

to cut a long story short

it turns out that ‘http’ URIs (a.k.a. URLs) are the worst kind of Web identifier…

…apart from all the others

(not everyone agrees with that!)

repositories

but arXiv was not the only repository

recognised need for aggregating metadata from different repositories into a single place so that

it could be searched

OAI-PMH

(a protocol for metadata harvesting)

harvesting metadata into repository search engines

of which OAIster is best known

(but it isn’t really used much)

and the major search engines like Google don’t support the OAI-PMH

because it isn’t mainstream enough

(and because of “metaspam” and “metacrap”)

and so to 2008…

political agenda around institutional repositories

in order to store, manage and disclose…

institutional assets

research paperslearning objectsresearch data

exposing metadata about these things using the OAI-PMH to search services

which services?

err… OAIster :-(

what kind of metadata?

typically DC

or a variant of DC

because simple DC is really too simple to be very useful

but unfortunately…

…DC variants tend to be more complex

and therefore metadata can’t be created very easily by ordinary researchers

but that’s another story!

why are we interested?

are we interested?

metadata is everywhere

metadata in sites like the Science Museum is mostly locked away within the site

can expect growing pressure to expose it on the Web for others to “mash up”

in HE, we are operating in an “institutional repository” political environment

we (should?) have an interest in repositories of research publications and research data

particularly research data

metadata comes to the fore in scenarios where content is non-textual (e.g. data) and where required information can’t easily be derived

from textual content (e.g. author name)

thank you

OK I lied…

…it was 128 slides

unless you count these last two

Does metadata matter?

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